The chemist Ilya Prigogine showed that systems kept far from balance by a steady flow of energy can organise themselves into new and more complex patterns, which he called dissipative structures, and won the Nobel Prize for it in 1977. The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman went on to argue that much of the order of life arises in the same way, “for free”, alongside natural selection, and later called the endless creativity of the universe sacred. The world is indeed creative and makes itself, and the energy doing the organising is itself alive and conscious.
What did Prigogine find about order far from equilibrium? #
That disorder is not the only way things can go. Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917, made his career in Belgium, took Belgian nationality in 1949 and died in Brussels in 2003. In 1977 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures”.1
The classical picture, based on the second law of thermodynamics, is of a world running down: heat spreads out, differences even out, and things drift towards a dull, uniform balance. Prigogine studied what happens in open systems that are held far from that balance by a constant flow of energy through them. Such systems can take in energy, spend it and pass it on, and in doing so reorganise themselves into new structures. A shallow layer of liquid heated evenly from below is the classic case. Past a certain point, the liquid stops simply passing heat upwards and breaks up into a pattern of rolling cells, often hexagonal, that move heat far more efficiently. Prigogine saw living organisms, and the weather, as systems of the same broad kind, unstable and far from equilibrium.1
He drew large conclusions from this. In Order Out of Chaos (in English, 1984), written with the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, and later in The End of Certainty (1997), the flow of time in one direction, the arrow of time, is presented as real and creative, not an illusion of our ignorance. In the second book’s words, “The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism.”1
What did Kauffman add? #
A biology of self-organisation. Stuart Kauffman, an American medical doctor and theoretical biologist born in 1939, worked for many years at the Santa Fe Institute, a centre for the study of complex systems. In the late 1960s he modelled networks of genes switching one another on and off, and suggested that the different kinds of cell in a body are stable patterns these networks settle into. He also proposed that a mixture of molecules, each helping to make the others, could start to reproduce itself as a whole, a possible route to the origin of life.2
From these and other studies he argued, in The Origins of Order (1993) and At Home in the Universe (1995), that much of the order in living things comes from self-organisation and the dynamics of systems far from equilibrium, not from natural selection alone. A chapter of the second book is called “Order for Free”. He did not set this against Darwin; his question was how to build a theory that combines self-organisation with selection, granting that selection is operating all the time.23
In a 2006 essay, “Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred”, and in his book Reinventing the Sacred (2008), he went further. New things with their own properties and powers keep arising in the universe, he argued, and their arrival cannot be predicted from physics. Living beings are agents, and “Out of agency comes value and meaning.” Life keeps expanding into what he calls the Adjacent Possible, the next set of things that could come into being from what exists now. And he proposed a natural sense of the sacred: “I want God to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours.”3
Why did Carl Rogers take an interest in Prigogine? #
Because Prigogine seemed to find in chemistry what Rogers had found in people. Rogers, the founder of person-centred counselling, held that every living thing has an actualising tendencyActualising tendency. Carl Rogers’s term for the drive in every living thing to grow into the best version of what it is meant to be. In animist terms, this is the drive of the Lower-World Soul. More about this, a drive to grow into the best it can be. In A Way of Being (1980) he widened this into a “formative tendency” at work in the whole universe, and drew on Prigogine, whom he described as a “Nobel Prize-winning chemist-philosopher”. In Prigogine’s account, as Rogers retold it, the more complex a system, the more energy it spends to stay that way; its fluctuations grow and are amplified until the system shifts suddenly into a new state, more ordered and coherent than before. Rogers quoted a 1979 summary of Prigogine’s work, by M. Ferguson in the Brain/Mind Bulletin, for its conclusion: “The more complex a system, the greater its potential for self-transcendence: its parts cooperate to reorganize it.”4 See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
Are their ideas accepted? #
In part. Dissipative structures are an established part of physical chemistry, and Prigogine’s Nobel Prize was for them. His wider claims about time are another matter. The physicist Jean Bricmont, in “Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science?” (1996), set out to clear up what he saw as confusions in the popular literature on chaos and the arrow of time, defending the classical ideas of Laplace and Boltzmann and criticising Prigogine’s views on irreversibility.5 Prigogine’s own position, held to the end, was that instability and irreversibility are built into nature, so that the future is genuinely open, not fixed in advance.6
Kauffman’s work has met similar questions. Critics have faulted the approach for giving too little weight to the role of energy in driving the chemistry of life, and the philosopher Roger Sansom’s Ingenious Genes (2011) is an extended criticism of Kauffman’s model of self-organising gene networks.7 Kauffman’s reply runs through his books: self-organisation is not offered instead of natural selection, but as the order that selection has to work with.8
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the picture of a world that makes itself. Everything is made of energy, and in shamanic reality everything is connected to and part of everything else; things that look separate are protrusions from a deeper web of energy.9 The physical world, in this teaching, is shaped by two things together: the Soul of a thing on one side, and the physical environment and how it responds to it on the other. Rocks are sculpted by water, trees are shaped by the wind and the direction of sunlight, animals by food and predators.10 Prigogine’s cells forming in heated liquid, and Kauffman’s molecules making one another, are pictures of new order arising out of exactly this kind of meeting between a thing and the flows around it.
The two scientists’ story of novelty is close to the story of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer. Billions of years after the Stone People came into being, a few of them went on to become Plant, opening up something that had never existed before, the possibility of getting the balance between Sun and Earth wrong; then Animal appeared, and with it something new again.11 And Rogers’ actualising tendency, which drew on Prigogine, is part of Therapeutic Shamanism too: all beings have a template, like a seed within them, and a drive to grow into it, and a plant growing through the cracks of a pavement is still trying to be the best it can be.12 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In what is doing the organising. For Prigogine and Kauffman, order arises from matter and energy following the laws of physics and chemistry; self-organisation is a property of the system, and neither man claimed it shows that matter is aware. Shamanism goes further than physics here. Not only is everything made of energy, but that energy is both alive and conscious, so everything around us is alive and conscious, in its own way.13 The patterns of the physical world are organised and held together from patterns, or blueprints, in a deeper reality,14 and in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer the Soul of a thing is what it was born to be: both the blueprint for how it could appear in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and the drive to become it.15 See What did David Bohm mean by the “implicate order”?
Kauffman’s sacred is also a different kind of thing. He asks us to revere creativity itself, a process. The creativity of the world is met as persons, the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, beings with whom humans can be in relationship and from whom they can learn. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
